Data Product Manager (Contractor) MNSITE-3838

RESPEC is an employee-owned company that tackles complex challenges in energy transition, infrastructure resilience, digital transformation, and sustainability. The Data Product Manager will lead the modernization of human services data for Minnesota state agencies, guiding data products from strategy and architecture through deployment and optimization. The role bridges executive stakeholders, data engineering, data science, and operational teams to deliver secure, governed, and consumable data products.

Responsibilities:

• Product Strategy & Roadmap: Partner with Enterprise Architecture, technical leads, and agency leadership to define the product vision, prioritize backlogs, and link data capabilities directly to state business outcomes
• Modernization & Lifecycle Delivery: Spearhead the migration of data pipelines from legacy mainframe environments to modern lakehouse platforms, ensuring robust data lineage, metadata cataloging, and automated data quality frameworks
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner directly with data engineering and data science teams to build scalable pipelines, analytical models, and reusable data services in Databricks and modern cloud tools
• Stakeholder Enablement & Analytics: Collaborate with analytics teams to implement interactive dashboards and KPI frameworks in Tableau, Power BI, and Looker while establishing metrics that quantify data product adoption and impact
• Governance & Ethical Data Use: Champion robust data privacy, governance, and ethical AI standards within a regulated human services framework, ensuring strict alignment with state and federal compliance policies
• Knowledge Transfer & Mentorship: Lead structured knowledge transfer sessions and documentation to ensure internal teams maintain long-term operational excellence

Requirements:

• 4+ Years of Professional Data Experience: Proven background in data management, data engineering, data analytics, or technical product management
• Data Systems & Modeling: Strong hands-on understanding of relational and non-relational database systems, SQL, ETL/ELT pipelines, data warehousing, and modern data lakehouse architectures
• Product Leadership: Demonstrated experience managing digital or data products through the full development lifecycle, translating ambiguous business requirements into clear technical specifications and user stories
• Stakeholder Management: Excellent verbal and written communication skills with a proven ability to translate complex technical concepts into business-friendly terms for executive leadership
• Candidates must be available during regular business hours of 7:00 AM – 6:00 PM Central Time, Monday through Friday
• All candidates must be physically located within the United States
• Databricks Expertise: Extensive hands-on experience designing or managing workflows within the Databricks platform
• Modern Analytics & Transformation Stack: Working familiarity with dbt as well as visualization tools such as Tableau, Power BI, Looker, or Google Analytics
• Programming Literacy: Fundamental understanding of Python and/or Java for data processing and platform development
• Public Sector / Regulated Industries: Prior experience working with large public sector agencies, healthcare, human services, or other highly regulated environments managing enterprise data sharing agreements and statistical reporting
• Internal Platform Development: Proven success building developer-facing data products or enterprise data meshes